INTERVIEW
Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer received Monday the Nobel Prize for Economics for their work on poverty. The French was at the microphone of Europe 1, Tuesday, to return on this prestigious prize which was awarded to him. First impression for the laureate? "A complete disbelief It was not in our perspective to have a Nobel Prize, and then, once realized, we felt great joy, it is the work of a whole movement that is rewarded".
"Overcoming the big general questions"
This work, precisely, concerns the fight against poverty. The originality of Esther Duflo and her two acolytes, her husband Abhijit Banerjee and Harvard researcher Michael Kremer, lies in their experimental approach to the fight against poverty. "The idea is to go beyond big and big questions and compose it into a series of much more specific and specific problems like, for example, 'why do kids go to school but do not learn much?'" .
Once the question is asked, the researchers try to find a solution to answer the specific problems. For this, they try, explains Esther Duflo, "to adopt a scientific approach and in particular to test solutions with an experimental method that resembles those of clinical trials for new drugs".